Thom Singer, a local author and motivational speaker, recently hosted a podcast on “How To Hire The Right Lawyer For Your Venture.”   Thom’s thoughts are interesting since he has a background working for two of the largest law firms in the country.  Thom’s podcast is an interview with a corporate lawyer and focuses on how to hire a lawyer for a new venture, but there are several points in the interview that would be helpful to those seeking to hire a personal injury attorney or litigator. 

 1.  View your lawyer as more than just providing legal advice.  For a start-up, a lawyer’s contacts in the community can be critical in helping obtain funding for the venture or other important assistance. 

While a personal injury victim doesn’t care about funding, the lawyer’s contacts and experience in the community are important.  Why?  Choice of doctors is one.  An experienced personal injury lawyer will have worked with a number of the doctors and medical providers in the community.  While we don’t like to recommend which doctors you see, we are more than happy to help you decide which doctors, hospitals, or other medical providers you should avoid.  Avoiding problem doctors can help with the care you receive and with he resolution of your case.

A good personal injury lawyer will also have good relationships with investigators, court reporters,videographers and others that can help in the pursuit of your claim.

2.  Remember that your lawyer is part of your team.  Picking an attorney is like picking your husband or wife.  You need to know that you can work together even in bad times.

This advice speaks for itself.  We always advise clients that a critical factor in their choice of attorneys is how well they get along with the lawyer.  Each case is different, but if we’re going to take your case to trial, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together.  If we can’t work together, then we’ll have a hard time being an effective team.

3.  The biggest mistake people make is waiting too long to visit an attorney.  Seeking an attorney after a problem arises makes resolution much more difficult and costly.

This advice is equally true in the personal injury context.  In smaller cases, we routinely have clients approach us after they have tried to resolve the issue themselves.  By that point,they have usually made several mistakes that compromise the value of their claim, making it harder on us to help them obtain a fair result. 

This is not limited to clients.  We are also routinely approached by other lawyers who tried to handle a personal injury claim and realized that they needed help.  Again, we may spend a lot of time and effort trying to fix problems that could have been easily avoided with proper advice up front.

Aditionally, on larger cases, much of the investigation work is done on the front end.  A case involving a wrongful death or other catastrophic injury may require a quick visit to the scene, testing or measurements of  the vehicles or products involved, etc.  Once the car has been repaired, the defective product has been destroyed, or the scene has been substantially modified, it is much more difficult to work up a case.   Understandably, personal injury victims aren’t thinking about these things.  They just want to get better.  But I guarantee you that in any significant trucking accident, the trucking company will have lawyers and experts on the scene within hours.

4.  The second biggest mistake is thinking that “my brother-in-law graduated from law school so he can set up my company.”

The day and age of a lawyer being a jack of all trades is over.  Even the most basic car wreck case has a number of difficult issues that attorneys that do not routinely practice personal injury law will not know.  For example, the concepts of “paid v. incurred,” 18.001 affidavits, and  subrogation, among others, are probably foreign to most lawyers, but are routine issues in personal injury claims that are evolving on a monthly basis.  A lawyer that doesn’t regularly practice personal injury litigation doesn’t have any chance of staying on top of these changing areas of law.

5.  It is difficult for a non-lawyerto know whether their lawyer is good or not.  How can you tell if you have a good lawyer or bad lawyer? First, try and get a referral from someone you respect.  Second,  check other sources to understand your lawyer — look at their websites, Google them, etc.  Finally, don’t be afraid to interview two or three lawyers.  Once you’ve done all that, then you have to rely on your gut.

 Again, that advice is also applicabl to personal injury litigation.  The one thing I would add is that this is an important decision.  Think of your job  — whether plumber, teacher, doctor, etc — whatever your profession, you know that there are members of your profession that do good work and members that do bad work.  There is the same spectrum of skills in the legal community. 

I’m a firm believer that I’m not competing with the other good personal injury lawyers in Austin.  There are enough people injured to keep all of us busy.  What I am concerned about is the lawyers that don’t routinely handle personal injury cases or the lawyers that do handle the cases, but who don’t put their clients’ interests first.  If you’re looking for a personal injury lawyer, I hope you do your due diligence to avoid these lawyers.

On a related note, let me also add that I did a blog series earlier taking snippets from Stephen Comiskey’s book, A Good Lawyer.  If you’re looking for a lawyer of any type, these snippets are useful.  You can read my posts here:  Chapter 1,  Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4,  and Chapter 5.   I also encourage you to read these posts if you’re a lawyer.  The book is tiny, but it is a gem, and it’s a good reminder of what we do.  Unfortunately, it appears to be out of print, though Chapters 1, 2, and 5 are reprinted in full in various issues of the Texas Bar Journal (with links to those articles in my respective posts on the chapters).

These are only some of the highlights of the podcast, and I encourage you to listen to the entire interview.  And if you’re looking for a professional public speaker, consider Thom.

In the last few months, opponents of health care reform have insisted that one key to lowering health care costs is the adoption of “tort reform” by capping the damages that can be recovered in medical malpractice cases.

For some time now, I’ve been urging people to look at the Texas medical malpractice  ”experiment”  to see if those claims were right. In 2003, the Texas legislature re-wrote Texas medical malpractice laws and put in place some of the most restrictive caps in the country. And where has it gotten us?

I’ve argued in the past that the Texas experiment proves that damage caps don’t help people. For instance, since the caps were put in place, the cost of health care has increased for Texas consumers. Similarly, Texans were promised that tort reform would significantly increase the number of doctors in areas of the state that traditionally have trouble finding medical care. By and large, that hasn’t occurred.

Now, a new study by Public Citizen not only helps prove my arguments, but shows that the results are even worse than I imagined. Have health care costs gone down since the adoption of Texas’s tort reform laws? No. In fact, the contrary has occurred. Since 2004, per patient Medicare spending (one of the best indicators of health care costs) has risen in Texas at nearly twice the national average. Similarly, tort reform supporters argue that doctors continually run unnecessary tests because they are scared of being sued. But the data shows that the increase in testing expenses in Texas has grown at a much higher rate than the national average.

Surely health insurance premiums for Texas consumers have been getting better since “tort reform”? Wrong again. Texas premiums have increased 144 percent for families since the adoption of tort reform. And that increase is just about at the national average.

Maybe medical malpractice caps haven’t decreased costs, but the reforms must be allowing new doctors to come to Texas, right? Yes and no. The number of doctors has increased since 2003. But that’s misleading. The growth in number of physicians per capita has increased at a much lower rate than we were growing prior to “tort reform.” Similarly, there is little, if any, difference in the number of doctors in the rural parts of area — the areas that really need doctors. In rural areas, the number of direct care physicians per capita is almost identical to what it was in 2003. And by and large, areas that were without various specialists are still without those specialists.

So what are we getting for “tort reform”? As a Dallas news-reporter noted:

So did Texans benefit from “tort reform”?

Doctors, some.

Insurance companies? A lot.

Most Texans probably couldn’t say.

But if you lost your baby after a difficult delivery, tort reform may have taken away your ability to find answers.

 We now have over five years of data showing that medical malpractice caps don’t produce the promised benefits.  The government shouldn’t take the mistakes that we’ve made in Texas and implement them all over the country.

This weekend, one family (including three young kids) lost their mother and another family lost their mother/grandmother because of  illegal street racing.   Fifty-three year old Maria Gaona De Corona and twenty-eight year old Adriana orales-Catalan were innocently sitting at a bus stop when nineteen year old Erick Armando Nuncio-Moreno blasted towards them, possibly at speeds up to 90 miles per hour, and slammed into them and their stop.  Witnesses have reported that Nuncio-Moreno was engaging in street racing at the time.

This is not the first time innocent Austinites have been victim of this careless conduct.  Almost two years ago to the day, I wrote another blog post about the increasing number of car wrecks Austin was experiencing due to street racing.  Later that year, the Austin Police Department announced that they were going to enforce a crack-down on street racing. 

And two years before that,  another 19 year old was among two people arrested when their street racing resulted in two deaths. 

Are these incidents isolated, or is there a real problem?  I’d like to stick my head in the sand and say it’s not a real issue, but in stumbling across an Austin street racing video, I think the problem is larger than many of us would like to admit.  Even more troubling to me, reading the comments to the video, the readers are posting popular locations for street racing even as late as late 2009, and many of those locations are the same places identified by police back in 2006 as most popular street racing sites. 

I just hope that the APD can get a handle on this problem and put a stop to these needless deaths and injuries.

I don’t have time to really comment on it, but Lise Olsen of the Houston Chronicle has a story in today’s paper about the surprising number of federal judges under investigation.  Led by Texas’s own Judge Kent, the story reads like a soap opera — we’ve got allegations involving nude photos, escort services, and accepting cash from lawyers.

To contact Austin Personal Injury Lawyer, Austin Personal Attorney, Austin Accident Lawyer, Austin Injury Lawyer Perlmutter & Schuelke, LLP or to learn more about Austin Personal Injury visit http://www.civtrial.com/.

Forgive me as I go a bit off topic.

As trial lawyers, we’re taught that it’s important to tell your story to the jury. Stories are powerful.

Most of us in Texas have spent the last few days watching the news. I mean, I had lunch at a sports bar Friday, and most of the TVs were tuned into the Weather Channel. The local and national news stations have done an okay job of explaining the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, but I have been extremely impressed by the coverage of the Houston Chronicle. The Chronicle has embraced the internet and new media to really provide the stories behind Hurricane Ike — not only stories from its own reporters, but stories, blog posts, videos and photos submitted from readers. Those are the real stories from Ike. I urge everyone to take a few minutes and read or watch some of those stories, particularly those from Galveston, which was probably hit hardest by the storm.

And then consider the stories we haven’t heard. Consider those in Haiti or Cuba or some of the other Caribbean countries that don’t have the opportunity to tell their stories. Because we concentrate on the stories of the US, we don’t get the same coverage or same stories from these countries. And then consider where these stories began. Compared to the lifestyles of most here in the US, these people started in a hole, and I have a hard time imagining how they find the hope and optimism to keep on going, especially after being hit by not one, but four large storms in a row. But somehow they do, and because their stories don’t get out to us, they often do it without the amount of aid or help that our Texas gulf coast residents can expect.

How are we doing? I’ve received some emails from attorneys out there just checking in. Austin is only 2 ½ hours from Houston, but with Hurricane Ike, it was a world apart. While Galveston and Houston were being decimated Saturday, Austin experienced blue skies and 90+ degree temperatures. The positive thing about that is that Austin has been able to take in refugees fleeing the coast. And they keep coming. I understand that busloads of coastal residents will be arriving in Austin and San Antonio today and the rest of the week while their home areas try to recover.

To contact Austin Personal Injury Lawyer, Austin Personal Attorney, Austin Accident Lawyer, Austin Injury Lawyer Perlmutter & Schuelke, LLP or to learn more about Austin Personal Injury visit http://www.civtrial.com/.

Kevin O’Keefe has posted Blawg Review #125.  We haven’t posted links to these in the past, but Kevin’s issue has some great information on blogging, and it appears he put a LOT of work into it.

Review # 123 was hosted by Austin’s own Texas Appellate Law Blog.

To contact Austin Personal Injury Lawyer, Austin Personal Attorney, Austin Accident Lawyer, Austin Injury Lawyer Perlmutter & Schuelke, LLP or to learn more about Austin Personal Injury visit http://www.civtrial.com/.